energy savings at home

Improving your home's energy efficiency with ENERGY STAR can help to lower high energy bills, improve comfort and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Learn about the many ways to save in your home and track your progress with "My ENERGY STAR" - your new dashboard to savings.

energy efficient new homes

A new home that has earned the ENERGY STAR label has undergone a process of inspections, testing, and verification to meet strict requirements set by the US EPA. ENERGY STAR certified homes use 15-30% less energy than typical new homes while delivering better comfort, quality, and durability.

This 2-page factsheet summarizes the energy, operational, and property characteristics of wastewater treatment plants benchmarking in Portfolio Manager. Other statistics are also presented in an easy-to-read format.

The factsheet is part of the Portfolio Manager DataTrends series, which uses the data available in Portfolio Manager to examine benchmarking and trends in energy and water consumption in hundreds of thousands of U.S. commercial buildings.

This 2-page factsheet summarizes the energy, operational, and property characteristics of courthouses benchmarking in Portfolio Manager. Other statistics are also presented in an easy-to-read format.

The factsheet is part of the Portfolio Manager DataTrends series, which uses the data available in Portfolio Manager to examine benchmarking and trends in energy and water consumption in hundreds of thousands of U.S. commercial buildings.

ENERGY STAR Award-winning partner CBRE engaged a research team from Maastricht University to measure the uptake of green building certification in the top 30 largest U.S. office markets from 2005 to 2013. The results are outlined in this 38-page report. Among the key findings are:

Learn how local governments have reduced energy use and showcased their successes in EPA’s ENERGY STAR National Building Competition. This 10-page case study series developed by ICMA details the experiences of Charlotte, NC; Cary, NC; and Hillsborough County, FL during the 2012 competition. From “crab, you’re it!” to a Chief’s Energy Challenge that pits fire stations against each other, find out how these local governments competed to save…and how you can too.

In 2011, New York City passed Local Law 84, which requires all large buildings in the city to measure and disclose energy consumption annually. This report analyzes data from the second year of benchmarking, and, as such, was the first report to be able to compare two robust sets of data. Among the more notable findings: the median 1 – 100 ENERGY STAR score of New York City buildings increased from a 64 to 67 between the two reporting years.

In May of 2012, the National Association of Counties and the Institute for Building Technology and Safety (IBTS) launched a study to learn more about how counties use energy in their buildings. Their goal is to help counties identify strategies to increase their energy efficiency by tracking energy use in their facilities and creating a plan for energy-saving improvements. Read this 15-page report for a summary of findings about county buildings and their energy use based on an analysis of data in ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager.

This case study from Miami-Dade county showcases how one of the nation’s largest school districts improved its facilities and maximized energy savings by using an existing tax-exempt master lease program to pay for a guaranteed savings performance contract.

This two-page primer provides an overview of two of the most popular mechanisms for financing energy efficiency projects in the public sector: performance contracts and tax-exempt lease-purchase agreements. Both mechanisms provide effective alternatives to traditional debt financing, and both may allow you to pay for energy efficiency upgrades by using money that is already set aside in your utility operating budget – allowing you to draw on dollars saved from future energy bills to pay for new, energy-efficient equipment and projects today.

This 11-page paper describes how performance contracts and tax-exempt lease-purchase agreements may offer you a practical solution when no money is available in the current budget for further improvements. It equips you to persuade the decision-makers within your school district, city, county, community college, university, or state that implementing energy efficiency upgrades is a good business decision and should be done as soon as possible.

This five-page article introduces energy performance contracts and the corresponding benefits of using tax-exempt lease-purchase agreements as the underlying financing vehicle. It explains how to use the energy inefficiencies buried in your current operating budget to pay for energy-saving equipment.